Skills & stuff ...

I'm a software developer at Yelp. I worked on the
search-infrastructure team integrating ElasticSearch into
our production environment (I probably shouldn't say much
more publicly), and am now working more on the quality
side, on a team aiming to curate Yelp's datasets.

I have scripting, design, and communication skills.
I am capable of both hacking and writing
production-grade code. Most of my experience is with
mid-layer server software, but I am generally competent
in Linux environments, and have written a bit of
frontend code (d3, Angular, REST, selenium) for internal sites.

I also have some experience with conflict resolution—I've
started conversations like,
“Hey, I'm really sorry when I said X; it came off wrong”,
or “I didn't entirely like how you brought up X”.
Personally, it's challenging, and something I've had to learn.
For the record, all of these discussions at Yelp have turned out
well, and led to a more positive work experience.

I have a lot of interest in research, but haven't produced
anything groundbreaking yet. Possibly related, I'm somewhat
transitioning from programming languages work I did in my
undergraduate years (as a research assistant), to machine
learning (I'm particularly interested in neural nets and NLP). Here's
my cv, but it
doesn't usually get updated that often.

Also, I'm sorry to disappoint, but I'm not currently [as of Sept
2014] available for hire.

Past interests ...

I was a student at UC Berkeley, under the supervision of
Ras Bodik.
I worked on tools to facilitate development of GPU programs, using
SKETCH
and Haskell EDSLs.
A while before that, I independently built a CUDA video coder using
GA-tuned
lifting wavelets. (More details on my CV).

Open source projects ...

I wrote a small open-source fork-based parallelism library
vimap,
which was developed partly at Yelp. Vimap is primarily aimed at
small tasks, like ad-hoc analysis or data loading [e.g. into
ElasticSearch], when you don't need the scale of map-reduce or the
like, but serial execution is too slow.

As of Sept 2014, I'm working on a very minimal library
plcd
to facilitate use of pre-loaded compression dictionaries.

I'm queer ...

I'm pretty out as genderqueer and physically transitioning / transsexual-like.
The latter term has various gender identity implications which don't hold true
for me, so I usually just call myself "genderqueer" if/when necessary.
I use gender-neutral pronouns and language (I don't care which neutral pronoun,
just try to gender me correctly; I suggest
ze/zir
or
they/them/their).
[ More on pronouns ]